Running Appcelerator on the Google App Engine

We know you’re excited about Google’s App Engine. How can you help it? If the opportunity to run your apps on a 20,000 terabyte per day cloud computer isn’t enough, certainly the ability to run Python on that cloud must be!

We were excited too, we admit. So yesterday we started porting our existing python server-side code to the App Engine, and today we’re releasing it through our developer network. This afternoon we ported Tejus’s appTunes demo to the App Engine and deployed it at http://apptunes.appspot.com.

So, how can you be incredibly hip too?

First, download and install Python 2.5, the App Engine SDK, and the Appcelerator SDK.

Now, make yourself a project and launch it locally (replacing myapp with your project’s name)

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app create:project . myapp appengine
cd myapp
app run:project

If this is your first time on the developer network, you’ll need to enter your login.

If everything installed correctly you will see a bunch of logging info ending with:

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Running application myapp on port 8080: http://localhost:8080

Like the other Appcelerator backends, you can find your message handlers in app/services/. So, go digest the App Engine documentation and write something great. Once you’re ready to send your app to the cloud just run:

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app deploy:project

This will ask you for your App Engine account info, and then upload your project.

We’re putting together a screencast of this, and now that I’ve finished futzing with Windows command-line problems for this integration, maybe I’ll get some time to learn the Datastore API.

And now, a message from our sponsors:

In the spirit of open source and shared learning, we’d like to acknowledge a few key pieces that we put together to make this demo application that Tejus built happen:

• Doug McCune for his super bad ass CoverFlow Flex Component. We’ve used the Appcelerator Widget API to widgetize this flex widget and allow it to be both declaratively added to markup and the power of Appcelerator’s Web Expression Language to add remoting capabilities for data binding. This also shows off the power of using Appcelerator + Adobe’s Flex bridge to get the best of both worlds.
• JS Sound Kit for the streaming audio for playing the MP3s. Again, we built this as a reusable widget.
• Jamendo and the independent artists for the awesome, DRM-free music and cool looking coverart.

Tech Tags: appcelerator ajax flex appengine google ria javascript opensource

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